Teflon Coated Baskets

I know what you are thinking. You’re thinking “what would happen if you coated a portafilter basket in teflon?”

Ok, so that probably isn’t what you are thinking, but it was clearly what Paul from Coffee Hit was thinking. Two of these baskets arrived in the post this morning for me to play with, and play we did!

I’m a fan of teflon in some places. I like my teflon coated portafilters very much, and I like my teflon coated low flow steam tip too. These I was a little more skeptical about. I made a very quick, silly little film to try and document a few things:

– The cone at the bottom never really forms on a naked portafilter. I’m not sure why. At first I thought it was because some holes must have gotten closed by the process, but the random nature of the patterns you get underneath seem to dispel that theory.

– Channelling is even easier than before. (No surprises)

– Cleaning is, er, very easy! (No surprises there either!)

– The shots taste odd. Odd in a way I can’t quite describe.

I’ll keep playing and report in if I find anything noteworthy! Enjoy the film!

i think keith nails the cone-formation question. i’m guessing the “odd” taste has to do with either a) hole size/variation in the basket, or b) lower surface tension basket changing the amount of bubbling in the espresso, causing a different amount of gas to stay put/bubble out. c) adrenalin in the taster from the excitement with the new toy. (:P) I doubt the coating does anything to the fluid flow inside the puck.
/often wrong, never in doubt/

Those are some pretty nasty looking shots!
Seems like it would be interesting to teflon coat only the sides of the basket, leaving the bottom uncoated. I think that would make cleaning and knocking out the puck easier, but hopefully not disrupt the extraction.
Did you measure any extraction yields?

Very interesting… strange. would seem to me the channeling concept carries through to how coffee exits this thing. A lot in some places and not so much in others. I have to imagine if uniformity in size and shape of holes is important that it would be hard to coat a finished basket with teflon and end up with a uniform pattern of holes of the same size and shape. Unless holes in basket were done AFTER a blank basket was teflon coated???

Colin, your comments always make me laugh. James, I can’t get passed the fact that the filter basket is BRIGHT GREEN! All other oddities in extraction pale by comparison to the utterly distracting glow-in-the-dark basket.